Frederick Brown 'had allegedly built up a thriving business selling counterfeit games and installing mod chips, having advertised his services on Craigslist and other web sites. He allegedly sold pirated games from his Vista, CA residence as well, including both discs and hard drives preloaded with games that he would install into customers' Xboxes and Xbox 360s.

That's absolutely nothing like what is being done in the article. This guy is modding the hardware to make the ps3 portable, the guy in your link was putting mod chips in the 360's so people could play pirated games, which he also sold. Just because the word "mod" is used in both stories doesn't make them similar.

I do actually remember those tests, sit and reaches, push ups, sit ups, mile time and maybe a couple other things that they would put into a nice graph to show how you stacked up to your peers. Being the fat, nerdy kid my line graphs were always about 1/3 as long as everybody else and well below the marked "standard." I also remember freshman year having to take swimming for 6 weeks too. Maybe my situation was rare, but I was never overly picked on because of those tests, and certainly not by the teachers.

I think heart rate monitors and the such to track students individually and just measuring their own progress instead of sticking them all to the same arbitrary "normal" number is better.

Yeah, it took about 15 minutes for kids to start slacking off and just shaking the thing for the last 5 minutes. You would think the gym teacher would have realized that every class a couple kids were running marathons in 60 minutes every single day, but he didn't and I guess that's why he's a gym teacher.

This seems to be what it's for. I'm 21 now, but during senior year we were required to use pedometers as the first step that was leading up to using heart rate monitors and pedometers to track the amount of work we did. The most we did was record the number of steps we took during class on our own personal chart to keep track of progress. The closest the school got to seeing the charts was when the gym teacher checked over everyone's chart at the end of the week to make sure everyone was doing it and to maybe encourage those that had lower numbers to try harder.

Try and find out from the school what data they'll be keeping, but for the most part this program seems to be getting lazy kids to work harder during gym.

I'm surprised that there's even an option for something more obscure than SmartMedia. I've heard the term twice, maybe, and even as I stare at the smartmedia port on my laptop I have no idea what it's for. I know nothing that uses it.

This is my experience. I care less about the frame rate and more about the size of the text. On my 29" 10 year old tv the text on the pitches on MLB 2k8 are so small my friends and I had to get right up near the tv just to read them. It's impossible to read the scoreboard in both NBA and NHL 09. It's not my eyes, I'm 21 and have 20/20 vision and this has never happened any other console generation. I've noticed my other games have smaller text than xbox and ps2 games, but with sports games it's almost unbearable.